Try to see the forest and not just the trees, Anaris.
Try to be more condescending, Buffakill.
It's about balancing the relative bargaining power of the different regions. As I said earlier, it's not necessary to remove all gold from rurals. That would be the most extreme version of this, but you could simply reduce it to a level where the necessity to trade is roughly equal.
In order to reduce the amount of gold produced by rural regions enough to make selling their food a necessity, rather than simply helpful, the amount of gold that would have to be removed from their production would have to be (in aggregate) quite significant. In order to keep the amount of gold in the game more or less balanced, a comparable amount would have to be added to the cities' (and other non-rural regions') production. It doesn't matter whether it's all of it or just a lot.
You could even introduce it gradually by, say, reducing rural regions' tax gold by 5% this week (or some other arbitrary number), another 5% next week until you see parity between buy and sell orders.
No...no, we really, really couldn't. The code that governs regional gold production just isn't anywhere near that simple.
The type of changes you're asking for would require one of two things: Either we sit down and calculate exactly what all the gold changes gamewide would need to be, and apply them all at once, or spend
months working out a system that could gradually ramp down gold production in rurals and simultaneously ramp it up in cities, with a kill switch so that we could stop it when we saw that it seemed balanced, and then
more months testing it to make sure it produced sane numbers.
As you pointed earlier, players set the prices. That's what the markets are for.
Yes, but a) right now, food prices are
capped at 50 gold/100 bushels, so the most a region producing 200 bushels a week could
possibly hope to make is 100 gold, and b) players' perceptions of what is "fair" don't necessarily change along with changes to the structure of the system, so it could be months or more before city lords were willing to pay more than 30 gold/100 bushels on average.
In general, Buffakill, your analysis of this situation is not completely off the mark, but the solution you propose both overly simplifies the problem, and would not have nearly the panacea effect that you are trying to make out, both due to the nature of the system and due to the nature of our players.